At the end of January, the NACCE Leadership Team traveled to (normally) sunny Florida to attend AACC’s Workforce Development Institute. While there may still be some who argue that workforce development is a separate conversation from entrepreneurship education, I disagree – as would many of the other cutting-edge organizations and movements dedicated to spurring job creation and innovation through entrepreneurship, such as the Kauffman Foundation, the Maker Movement, , and WalMart/Sam’s Club. I talked briefly about this while I was onsite at WDI. Click here to watch the video.

One of those examples is with the “Slingshot Network” of colleges. NACCE has been working closely with AACC and the Kauffman Foundation for over a year with a select group of colleges called the Slingshot Network. The concept of the “slingshot effect” is to convene and support the brightest and most effective colleges together, led by the Kauffman Foundation with guidance from AACC and NACCE for a series of “collision” activities to launch their individual campuses on more creative and faster trajectories than they could achieve alone. In doing so, these Slingshot colleges will create optimal models for other campuses in the NACCE member community to chart their own course.